The beginning of the work year

With being sick and the beginning of the teaching year, my resolution to write every day has gone wanting. I must be patient with myself, and make sure that next week when things are a little more regular that I have organized my time so that I can do some writing. Actually, I have put some more words on the page for the beginning chapters. And in doing so, and starting Ken Scholes' Lamentation, I've gained some insight into how this process is going to work.

First, I'm really out of practice and just turning out quality sentences that move the story along. Or perhaps it's just that I am overly concerned with each word, and each sentence, because the going is slow. I believe part of this is not being sure what the first chapter is supposed to do, even though I have outlined it pretty thoroughly. I am happy with the words I've put down so far, but I'd like to see them appearing more rapidly! First, I had started with this idea that I could write what was basically a short story as the first chapter, but as I've gotten through the first ten or so pages I realize this is a bad idea, because a short story does not carry the burden of building a world in which the succeeding action will take place. Using a first-person narrative, and staying true to the voice -- I don't like those narratives where the speaker breaks away from the story at hand, the present, to provide historical background or social analysis. Maybe that works when the speaker is an erudite adult with an interest in theory, but not when the speaker is a sixteen year-old outcast with minimal education and a lot of minute-to-minute issues to deal with. Whatever details are provided must move the story forward, but there must be enough of them to convey the shape and sound and smell of the world in which he lives.

In Lamentation, which is growing on me with each chapter, the pov is third-person omniscient, or rather, there are several main characters, with different chapters focusing on their actions and perceptions. In each case, the third-person narrator knows what the main character knows and sees and thinks: through this mechanism, a great deal of detail about the fantasy worlds in which the characters live is revealed in a reasonable unobtrusive way. The different characters have access to very different kinds of information. Perhaps as the intertwined narratives continue, there will be less need to provide background information. Another things I generally don't like in fiction of any kind is the sort of  imbalance of popular movies, where there's a lot of meditation and conversation for about half or two-thirds of the book/film, and then someone turns up the speed, like we used to listen to the Allman Bros. at 45, and the last couple chapters proceed like a car crash. It's sort of like bad sex. A good amount of foreplay, and then a rush to climax. A different way to say that is that I prefer a pace that is more even, or variegated according to the perception of time, with some effort to slow things down when they threaten to run away, or to speed things up when the breath nearly ceases.

I also in this time of not actually writing as much as I would like came up with some more of the plot motivation, in thinking about the world at the beginning. In this world (Bratislava), the waters of a great flood have receded considerably, but there is a reduced population due to a pestilence that either preceded or accompanied the disaster of the flood. Let's imagine rather than a doomsayer's litany of the bad things that are destined to happen, more of a series of unfortunate events, in the context of peak oil et al. So as society and political structures begin to unravel relative to, say, the economics of energy -- e.g. the EU comes apart, communist parties take control of some governments, some ethnically compromised nations split or go to war with themselves. Maybe even Russian becomes the lingua franca on the region. Then, in a somewhat unrelated way, there is a climactic or geological event, like the explosion of the Yellowstone volcano, that disrupts the climate, and in the aftermath, a very ordinary old-fashioned illness like small pox or something descends on what's left of the population, a plague. As the people move back into the city and re-establish the rudiments of civil society, an economy, and government, there is a prohibition enacted against what are called the Magiks, due to the dubious relation between this group of individuals with strange abilities and the class of bio-scientists who are believed to have made the errors that led to the downfall of the previous order. Our two main characters, both possessed of less than well-controlled or even useful, abilities, become the targets of bounty-hunters (in the absence of anything like an organized police force.) It's fantasy or science fiction and I can make up whatever shit I want, as long as it seem reasonably credible. Having re-acquainted myself with contemporary sci fi and fantasy, I realize that credibility is more a matter of imagination than it is scientific probability.

The dynamics of wanting

On one of those advice-giving blogs I've been reading -- there's undoubtedly a good short story there -- one the writers (Edmund Schubert, author and editor of Intergalactic Medicine Show) has written a couple times about making sure your characters want something, and that this desire shapes the story in a way that sets up expectations and interest for the reader. He quotes Vonnegut, who says somewhere that a character can just want a glass of water. I was thinking about his while I was doing my daily walk yesterday and it started to make more sense and to connect to stuff I do in my teaching life on motivation.

So you start a story with "More than anything, I wanted a glass of water." And this can set the whole mouse-trap in motion. What I was thinking, though, was that desire is always preceded by need, or lack, or anxiety, or something psychological, that is, he wants a glass of water for some reason. He's thirsty, he has a terrible taste in his mouth, he's trying to recover from alcoholism. So there's always an unsaid sentence before the first sentence that sets the stage, that only the author knows, or ought to know, and say to himself. I tell my students about motivation -- which is related to want and desire -- that we tend unfortunately to think of it either in a passive sense or as a character attribute. Someone is motivated to drink a glass or water. Someone is motivated to get off the bottle. I recommend that we think of motivation as X causes (or some derivative) Y to do Z, and that this helps us understand behavior and its related thinking and feeling better. Thirst makes me want to drink a glass of water. What happens next? Well, that depends on the environment, and it depends on "thirst" (as a physical and/or psychological demand) and its depends on how Y responds to his own desire. In a situation where Y has just come in from a long walk in the sun, and gets a glass from the cupboard, and draws some water from the spigot, and drinks it, not a lot is going to be revealed. If the environment offers no water, then the situation is different. If Y's thirst, and his relationship to his own desire, is problematic is some way -- let's say he is always thirsty and his survival depends on drinking water only when he actually needs it -- then we have a different kind of story. If we replace "water" with "Jack Daniels" we have a different story. And we can play with the "more than anything" part, by asking, "really, more than anything?" 


In my own story, what does Havel want? The way I've set it up what he wants is (a) to get away from where and what he is, and (b) to get back to where and what he imagines he ought to be. Both physically being the same place. More operationally, X causes Havel to do something (or to think, believe, want, feel) something. Guilt about teleporting Bloehm and her not returning causes Havel to feel badly about himself and to want to separate himself from others. The animus of the community causes Havel to leave the garage. The betrayal of his father causes Havel to want to remove himself from the site of pain. The bounty hunter causes Havel to run. So there are a preponderance of causes for Havel to flee. But none of this answers the larger question of what Havel wants, or rather they complicate it. It seems he both wants to harm himself (by further separating himself from society and family) and to save himself (by preventing capture for his "crime," to which he admits). His almost immediate recontact with people demonstrate that his real need is to not be alone, but rather to reconnect, while the more existential dilemma of being caught becomes more acute and requires the help of others. At the higher level, Havel wants to find Bloehm, and to restore her, and thus to restore himself.

The next question, raised also by Schubert, is how I see the story ending, because without a sense of the goal, it's hard to go in the right direction. Because young adult novels have to have at least somewhat happy endings, I can't just have everyone die or go insane on the last page. I think I'd like to see Havel and Bloehm, together, returning to the parking garage to find it either gone, or with some completely other use. The notion would be that they are not in the same time-space in which they began the story. Probably they have gone further along. This is not an entirely happy ending, but it does leave space to go on with the story, on one hand, or just to go on with life, such as it is, on the other.

Marching orders

Despite all the good advice one can find about how to write a novel, and the self-talkings-to that occur at regular intervals, the business of getting the bus rolling toward a destination remains difficult. My problem throughout my scholarly writing career has been usually a lack of planning, an enthusiasm for substance over form, and a tendency to write myself into corners or corn filelds. For instance, I have this one paper that I think is probably pretty good, and informative and insightful, but I believe nobody will publish it until I completely write it into another form. Now I've taken that not so much as a reason to revise as a reason to abandon ship, mostly because I get so little personally out of writing to form, even when publication occurs. But that doesn't mean I shouldn't plan more and better for writing a novel, and keep the form and purpose and readership in mind as I do so, and as I write. It has also become apparent to me, as a novice novel-writer, that my narrative imagination is something like medieval maps, highly detailed at the local level, but tapering off into the distance, where one sees names like The Wastelands, or The Impassible Mountains. I don't really know what's going to happen next, or where it's going, except in the most vague sense, and I don't think this is enough to start driving the car down the highway, to return to my previous clichéd metaphor. The problem, for me, with planning -- which has meant doing the snowflake and other stuff -- is not that I mind doing it, or that it's not producing good results, but that I feel anxious that I will never really get "started." But my marching orders for the day are "stay the course," As Antoine de Saint-Exupery said (thank you, quotationspage.com, "A plan without a goal is just a wish," which I think is not really apropos, but does get me further toward what I wanted to say. It is through the planning that my wish is transformed into a goal. The simple plan to "write a novel" was just a wish, like the ones related to weighing 180 pounds, driving a Porsche, and cleaning up my office.

Making time

Even though today is my professional day, and I still have not done all the stuff I scheduled for myself, I decided to post something here. As a transgression. It's always been very easy to allow the flood of small jobs related to my work drown everything else, but now I would like to summon a countering flood of imagination related to writing. Similarly, it has always been easy not to exercise because I had "too much to do" and that also will change. It is possible to be efficient in one's work, and to put it in its place, not to allow it to put me in its place. Part of this resistance entails resistance to people, sometimes students but most often not, who have the expectation, the demand, that my priorities will be thus and so. This they demand even when, or perhaps because, their own priorities are not thus and so. But let me positive: today I finished one syllabus, along with many of the assignments, and a good chunk of the new reading for this course. Now I will commence to read the one book for my other course that I have not previously read and taught. And before that, I'm going to make a little start on my portfolio task for student teaching. Tomorrow is the fall conference, so the morning is wasted, but I will hold the line this weekend and in other weekends against working at home.

Structure, re-structure

My idea for the time-honored and popular-with-readers-and-publishers trilogy was that the first volume would follow the story one main character, and the second would follow the story of the second main character, each with a first-person narrative (forbidden, I understand), and the third volume would bring them together with a third-person, or even another first person, narrative. In developing the first MC, Havel, I have found myself thinking of him as a sort of young Clint Eastwood, driven by guilt and anger over separation, or something like that. This leads him to be somewhat darker and more dangerous and less dorky than Harry Potter, but with also a very soft underbelly where he feels things intensely and is prepared to make ultimate sacrifices, partly because he values himself rather little. So the story is to some extent one of redemption through quest.

But the main source of guilt is his belief that he has killed a girl he liked in trying to help her, by teleporting her into the nevermore. I thought for a young adult novel, it might be best if the actual survival, if misplacement of this character, were shown to the reader early on, so that Havel is feeling guilty for something he hasn't actually done, or done to the degree that he imagined. Also, I wondered if staying in his head exclusively for 400 pages was a great idea. My new idea then is to incorporate what would have been two consecutive first-person narratives into two continuous volumes in which the stories and voices alternate. The more I think about this, the more I like it. Thus, the originating story in the parking garage can be retold in the second section (around 100, or even fifty pages) in, from Bloehm's point of view. Also this allows me to create the two contrasting worlds of Nitra and Nova Huta simultaneously, and to make the tension between them greater, so that even if the result of their being connected by the salt road through the in-between is not understood well by the characters, it is understood by the readers. This will make the readers more ambivalent about the actions and motivations of the characters. Finally, this setup provides an opportunity to keep a romance-of-the-imagination more vividly alive.

Becoming a writer

and not just someone who writes. I was trying to figure out the logistics of writing a three volume YA masterpiece that would sell million of copies and allow me to retire to a Greek island, and I came up with about 375,000 words, or 1200 pages, or 60 twenty-page chapters. That's not just lunch at the diner, that's solid beating on the keys for a long time. But that is my goal, even the Greek island part, though I might make due with a hut and pail. This is not the work of a weekend dabbler, any more than being able to shoot par or run a marathon is something you get every other Saturday. I do have another job, or a real job, but it's pretty much adjustable to however much time I feel like putting into it. But if this project is to be done, then the job, the teaching and being-part-of-the-community part, have to be back-grounded. And I've not ever been able to do that sufficiently, even when my other writing was academic. It suffered seriously from half-assed-ness. In concrete terms, I must plan my teaching etc around my writing, and not the other way, though of course my teaching takes place at certain times on certain days. But it must not leak out and fill every other crevice of time.

Location location location

I began by setting my story in a future Wisconsin, near where I live, for several good reasons. Then I moved it to Central Europe, Slovakia in particular, for other good reasons. Though the fact that I have just returned from Slovakia was a primary motivator. Or, at least it gave me the first hand experience and knowledge of a setting that fit well with the structure of my story. There was also the matter of the salt road, which had attracted me -- like it has attracted many others. I also have learned about the more famous salt road from the marshes near Venice to the highlands where prosciutto and other stuff was produced. But I had become attached to the mountains, as an In-Between. I have worried about my treatment of the Rom as major characters, but then someone has to serve this role, and it does give me the opportunity to portray these people in a more positive light than previous depictions. And there is a good deal to be said for a location with castles and a fitting geography and history.

What will readers, young adults apparently, think about this location? It has promises both for the traditional fantasy realm, and for gritty post-apocalyptic dystopia. In fact, Slovakia and other parts of Central Europe already convey these contrasts -- castles, panelaky and abandoned mega-industrial complexes like the steel mills of Nova Huta, super-glitz shopping malls, ritual pig-slaughters, drinking, atomic physics and the manufacture of weapons, the strangeness of Slavic languages ... The American locale offers a much more shallow history, unless ones partakes of the Native American history, which was my original plan -- all the names were in Ojibwe. I suppose its not more or less exploitative to use Indians than it is to use Gypsies. In either case, my intention seems to be put a marginalized, degraded people into a position of centrality and power. In both cases, these "natives" occupied the land that the white folks wish to cross. In the American context, this is a replay of American history, in European history, it is also a replay, but of a different type. My conclusion for now is that I should stay in Karpatia, and be even more exotically there, without for now getting into Romania and the vampires.

Apprehension

When beginning to write the actual text of this work I've been working on working on, a weight attaches to the motion making words appear. At the end of the rope pulling down against the emergence of words on the page is fear, plain and simple, of not being good enough. I think there's a passage in 2666 about this fear. It coexists with confidence in one's ability, with fantasies of grandeur, with knowledge and skill, with excellent planning, with sloth and distractibility. It is a sort of valence, an electrical charge that makes me slightly more likely to do one thing than another. It is the well-spring of doubts, legitimate and irrational. There's a good deal more to fear than fear itself; it cannot be banished, it can only be directed or ignored or worked with and through.

I worry that nobody will value what I write. Join the club. Keep writing.

Things I've learned

As an academic scholar in the social sciences, curiosity is usually a liability. It gets you off-topic, it makes you think and then write about things your colleagues in the field don't care about or understand. It gets you a lot of "interesting, but not right for this journal" responses from editors. Curiosity leaves you standing alone at the bar at conventions in your field, it leads to a sampling of disciplines rather than a focus on a problem recognized as relevant by the "community" (of which one is not typically a member). In the world of the 9,000 word article, the fruits of curiosity are cut from the final text, where one is required to repeat a great deal of what others have already said as part of what goes by the name of "conceptual framework." Needless to say, it is a tremendous bore and there are very few who actually read what other scholars write, and if they do, it's for the purpose of one-upping them. Since progress not appreciation is the object of science.

I'm finding in these first phases of writing a novel that curiosity runs wild, though time will tell if it any more useful than it was when I was writing articles about minority education. Today I learned more about humanure toilets and energy production, about other low-voltage, low-wattage devices like LCD lightbulbs, and about the body as a generator of re-usable energy. I figured that since we are stuck at 98.7,  a good deal warmer than the outside air most of the time, that there must be ways in which this heat could be recycled, such as in powering an LCD bulb on your forehead or someplace else more practical. And since we do move on our own, both the energy that is used efficiently and that which is wasted might be recycled. Hence my idea that a downhill skating track could generate energy, through the wheels of the board going down, little turbines, and through the energy expended by the young people getting back up to the top of the track. Now maybe it would be easier to just extract this energy directly from whatever they were eating, but they like to eat and skate down and run back up. In my post-petroleum world, folks are not lying around grieving the demise of Chrysler and waiting to die. There's an ethic and an economy in which energy has value, the value we ought to promulgate now ... which of course would be one goal of literature, to promote a moral. Anyway, I also learned a good deal about the use of salt in the Roman world, learned that the word "salary" comes from salt (sal) because sometime soldiers were paid in salt. In fact, the word soldier originate in salt. And in the spirit of learning to make things, or learning about making things whether I personally make them or not, I learned about fish sauce (made by the way, by Romans, not just SE Asians), one of the preferred ways of putting salt into action. And then I read the Roman recipe for producing a ham, taken from a Celtic source. Meaning that the prosciutto derives probably from the original ham-sters, those handy Celts who the Romans wiped out. In my story, some of that ham-making salt came from Galicia (where Gal is related to the Celtic word for salt) in Poland. The premise of the book is then similar to that which motivated the Romans, get some salt and make a pig last longer and taste better.

Some of the technological magic kit I intend to feature in my novel is a body suit that generates heat from body heat. We already have such things: "Disclosed is a heat-retaining, moisture-permeable, waterproof fabric having a highly moisture-absorbing and releasing organic fine particles immobilized on at least one surface of an unprocessed fabric (base fabric) with a moisture-permeable waterproof resin. The fabric is capable of generating heat by the absorption of moisture." That's patent number 6046119 issued in 2000. I figure a little bit of electricity from the body would make this work even better, and keep one quite warm in Karpatia. Naturally such things would be either heirlooms and very rare, or scarce and expensive, or make one place and not another. And I want a wagon, pulled and directed by a horse or something and a human that is able to use the kinetic energy of going downhill to move it back up the hill without needing extra calories. Could you put it on a railroad track? Then there are the single-use flyers which can use the smallest air current to rise up into the air -- something like paragliding. And one of my MCs who has some extra-special trick can make such a vehicle go faster and farther and higher, and is able to drop like a feather. Then there is the self-sustaining pig farm that I must create, replete with the ancient zabijacka, because still the pig must die for us to have prosciutto. I'm thinking that as in the old days, salted meat and salted fish could serve as a sort of money. I had originally thought, then rejected the idea, of fish, but perhaps I should not be hasty. What about all those new catfish now spawning in the new tributaries in the delta where the hron meets the Danube. I think in this area it might be time to re-invent Cajun cooking, some rice growing ....

Forecasting futures

A couple days ago I finished PB's The Windup Girl and now I am reading IM's River of Gods. Also, not long ago I read JV's Veniss Underground, all of which feature dystopic cities with a preponderance of genetically-altered and/or AIs, plus an oppressive corporate presence that overrules government. Their worlds are generally anarchic, violent, with fantastic wealth juxtaposed with fantastic poverty. In other words, these future cities look a lot like some contemporary global cities, particularly in the developing world. It's not coincidental that two of them are recognizably in south Asia: Veniss could be anywhere. The protagonists -- I'm not far enough in River of Gods to know who the protagonists are -- are flawed and frequently just plain weird, though also quite recognizable (like the calorie man in Windup Girl and the girl who gets dismembered in Veniss Underground.) All of these books feature ecological disaster of some sort or another, as well as plagues etc. Computer technology does not play much role in Windup Girl but is a central player in the other two.

I'm trying to find my way, but it seems that my futuristic setting is less urban and less degraded than those in these books. I suppose my premise is that famines, plagues, ecological disaster, post-oil would affect some places differently than others. In my WIP,  Bratislava and Budapest are largely deserted, with some recent re-population as a result of epidemic, flood/cold, and the winding down of carbon-based globalism. But a smaller city not so far away has not been affected in the same way -- out of the zone of flooding, semi-self-sufficient with respect to food and resources, self-quarantined geographically (by closing bridges, preventing in-migration of infected people). One notion I had was that globalism and its attendant large scale governmental structures (national and post-nationalism) are artifacts of the possibilities of production and transportation with cheap oil. The EU could implode any day now as the result of austerity, debt, etc. So let's say it starts with Greece, Portugal, moves toward the center. The place of Brussels is taken by Ankara in the south maybe, maybe by Moscow. The next step is the dissolution of nation-states along ethnic and geographical fault lines, and their replacement with regions, cities, enclaves, fiefdoms and republics. This could be both the product and the producer of the decline of global commerce and production. Why make something that nobody can buy, when the price of bringing it to market rises? The Free City of Nitra puts tariffs on imported goods that can be made locally, travel (and trade) are complicated and made more expensive, and so on. In my world, the wilderness -- damaged in the Carbon Age -- has now regenerated itself, not in exactly the same manner, but in a manner that makes it more wild than before, increasingly impassible, increasingly able to impose isolation and separation on those living within and without. The urge for trade and expansion, though, returns, when one entity wants something available somewhere else -- like amber or salt or bananas or procciutto.

So my city is smaller, practices conservation to a great degree, slow food, etc. There are post-modern technologies side by side with Medieval technologies (nano computers run on body heat, carts pulled by horses, windmills ...) And there's magic or special talents. But I don't want it either to regress to a complete pre-modern fantasy world (though castles are good, and still present), or to a post-apocalyptic utopia or barbarism. In some ways, then, I plan for this world to be something like what the world is today (just like these more dystopic future cities) but different too. A place for the King of Pigs.

The story gets bigger as the story gets smaller

When you begin by imagining something really big, usually it's because you haven't worked out any of the details and you expect that they are in some ways immaterial. This is how many of college students approach their writing: they have this idea and if they could just get it all down on paper in a more or less sequential manner, then all would be good, and the A would come forth. Unfortunately, after the pre-writing conversation, it comes out that they've really not got more than a paragraph of really coherent idea, and mostly it's just blather. "Schools would be better if they weren't boring." Yea, true dat. What makes their writing potentially interesting, in this case, is their own experience as being (a) bored witless, and (b) convinced that this educational experience was good for them in a way that would be revealed some time in the future (when Christ comes down to harrow the sinners once and for all).

My own novel-writing project has followed this trajectory as well: the vague and grandiose vision with which I began was eventually revealed as a half-baked first sentence full of adverbs. And I hate adverbs. But through a good deal of talking to myself, by writing, I believe I am coming to something a little more chewy. And the more I fuss with the detail of imagining a world, real or fantastical, in which my characters, those little avatars of self, might inhabit and do something interesting in, the richer the possibilities become. I am using, off and on, the snowflake method, which I found somewhere online, where one starts with a one sentence summary, moves through a longer synopsis, characters sketches and synopses, and then something else. I have decided to treat what I hope will be a three part/volume novel as one, making the relationships between the plot elements, the world, and the characters more organic.

I'm very pleased with the arrival of a new main supporting character, Kral Sviň (King of the Pigs) who is adult with undisclosed some special abilities and relationship, and a business. His business of raising pigs and selling pork products is the centerpiece and engine of the plot. He wants to make sausage, in particular, something like Prosciutto, and he has no salt. He is limited to fresh and frozen pork products and to smoke curing. [Of course, as we find out later, salt has other special properties in which he has a keen interest.] Both main characters find themselves working for Kral Sviň, who has many stories about history and life. [It turns out that he has been around since the time of the Union, several normal lifetimes, in various guises and is related to the Rromii: perhaps he is actually one of them. Both Havel and Bloehm seem to find themselves with him by strange chance, but it is their magic that has brought them to him. In fact, he collects magical young people. I'm thinking of a sort of Romani-Slovak Obi Wan Kenobe with pigs. So the pig-slaughter, the zabijačka, will figure in the story as well. Another major secondary character is Jasmina, who Havel is supposed to protect in the first part, but who disappears in the battle at Kráľova hoľa (where Slovak folk hero Juraj Jánošík appears ... more on that later). Anyway, each added character and place, full contextualized historically, geographically and culturally, puts the meat on the bone. Though more and more, it doesn't seem absolutely necessary to the story that there be a futuristic setting ...

A new title

Now, since nobody but me reads this, I can change the name at will. Now we have Karpatia, a region rather than a theme for the title. This is because there are already at least two other current novels called The Salt Road, and because I'm doing pork instead of fish now, and because the books will be about Karpatia, the in-between of central and eastern europe, what has historically divided the north from the south, and in many places, east from west.

Old stories, new stories, real stories, made-up stories

This headings are valuable in thinking about my own writing, and in thinking about when I teach my course on literacy this fall, which includes doing writing workshops with K-2 students. For me, to read some of my old "fiction" and to write a new piece about my father's drinking made me think and feel deeply about my own history and the "meaning" of my life. Perhaps in some ways it is simple therapy of the self, done with words that could be private. But the stories, I think, are quite good enough to be published, which I'm assuming means that someone would be interested in reading them. The reason why I did not pursue publication is part of the story, though probably it would require some imagination to make it interesting to anyone else. But, of course, that goes for most everything I have written in these stories. One thing that comes across to me from this prose written quite a number of years ago is that I have always been able to write. That is something of a revelation.

On the other hand, I'm not that sure that this is the sort of thing I would want to read. Or the kind of thing I would like to focus now on writing. One partly unconscious reason, I think, not to pursue publication in the past was not to speak publicly of my father or my feeling towards him. But now he is gone and it would seem that I can say whatever I want. But maybe now I have little left to say, at least directly. I could write the fictional story of the man who yearned to share his writing with his father before he died, and the attempts to do so, and to not do so -- it could even be comedic -- and his eventual decision to let it go. There's a big lie there, naturally, but there's a lot to think about when it comes to the morality of lying and truth-telling. It's not always ethical and moral, let alone practical, to tell the truth. And one's own truth is not necessarily anyone else's. One reason not to tell the truth is the fear of finding out that you got it all wrong. I haven't ever written a story in which my father was the good guy, but truth would demand that story as well.

But while I appreciate the kind of writing in which I was engaged for many years, I don't read much of it anymore. Actually, I'd like to read more of it and now that I have foresworn academic reading there will be more opportunity. What does it mean to write and read fantasy, where there is so much real history and painful history? The answer is of course to obvious to state, but I better state it. Fantasy is the working out of conflicts and desire in relative safety. It is the dream-world, the world of magic, the world of childhood. All the best fantasies are brimful of pain, discomfort, tragedy and death, but in most cases the ending is hopeful. And that is what I would like to read and write, made-up stories that repair the world and save the self. One could return to Adorno's reflections on art after the Holocaust, and his pessimism about its possibilities. History has demonstrated that he was not entirely correct: art has flourished and not just as forgetfulness. What I will teach my students is that there is not so much difference between "real" stories and "made-up" stories, that each includes the other.

Old stories

For the past couple days I've been organizing, reading and editing old stories, mostly from the 1980s and 1990s. I'm amazed at how many there are and how good they are. What was I thinking not to seriously pursue getting published. Because my attempts were sporadic and uninformed, and unsuccessful too. But I think now that I will re-submit these stories and see whether I can get some publications. Many of my stories were at least partly autobiographical and so I've been reminded of things that happened that I've haven't thought about for a long time. I've been reminded of the anger I felt and probably still feel toward my father, as he is a frequent character. It's kind of a bleak back side to the "shit my dad says" book and show. Like, it wasn't nice and it wasn't funny either, the things he said, and the things he did. I could write a flash fiction about all the stupid shit he did, right down to his last opiated days. But there are other things that I wrote that are funny. And there was a persona I created, a consistent character, not a real attractive character either. My self-image.

"When my father was thirty three he almost cut his finger off with a table saw. And then he hurt his back digging a hole. In both cases, he chose bourbon as a pain-killer. It's the first I remember of his drinking, except for the beer everyone drank when my parents went water skiing."

"In the last year of his life my father gave up drinking because he was taking enormous doses of codeine and later morphine for the cancer in his bones. He said he hardly noticed not drinking."

"My father's marriage to Leona was founded in desperation and ended the same way. She was a spiteful little woman, long-divorced and caring for her father who was nearly 100 years old, clutching as straws. My father was mourning my mother's death by replacing her with women he hated for not being her. One night they both got drunk and beat each other up. She got the house and he got a night in jail and anger-management and substance abuse classes. He always claimed that he looked worse after the fight than she did. For a while he didn't drink because the judge forbade him, but eventually he got over his fear."

"My father's marriage to Mary Jane was founded in false hope and ended in desperation, and then he died. She about bankrupted him with her crazy business and delusions of grandeur. Once they were at her daughter's home in California, on their way to Arizona for the winter, and my father got into some sort of drunken altercation with Mary Janes' son-in-law, and after that they were not welcome at their house."

"When I was home from college one summer, my mother and father went to a party at one of my mother's colleagues homes. There was lot of drinking. Someone said something to my mother that my father found offensive and he about threw the person in the pool. When they came home he came into my room with just a t-shirt on, his penis hanging down below, and told me the whole story. Then he went and pissed off the deck into the back yard."

There are a quite a few more to tell.

The skate park

This morning I began to write, as opposed to planning and plotting and muttering to myself in print. I was afraid that the words would not come, that I would be held captive in the planning phase forever, like the old man with his travel brochures, looking at all the places he was going to go and still not realizing that the future was now the past, and he was just remembering what he'd never done, not dreaming about what he might someday do. I started by thinking that this would be a free-standing story, and maybe it will still pass that test -- as every chapter of a book ought to -- but now I see it as the beginning of the big story, where the table gets set. I need another first chapter for the second volume, which I may write simultaneously with the first. Here's what I've done so far: (501 words)

My first night in the garage I was awakened by a gravely whine of wheels on concrete, first a rumor, then a roar, as the skater flashed by in a jacket of her own light. Like a firefly, and then darkness and silence returned. When I was little, I might have taken it for a dream and gone back to sleep, but I had seen already too much of the real to misrecognize flesh and blood for what the mind makes. I opened the door of the old Škoda where I slept, my feet under the steering wheel and my head in the trunk, and tiptoed across the oil-stained ramp where the skater has passed. The sound of the wheels was gone, but now I could almost hear the sound of feet slapping the up-stairs. Should I go wait for her, see what kind of thing she was up close? I didn't even know how I knew it was a girl, the skater had gone by so quickly, just as I opened my eyes. It could have been anyone. But still I knew it was a girl, the way you know when you're getting sick and not just coughing dust. The door to the stairwell was maybe fifty feet down the ramp where I stood, rusted white shining against the gloom. The sound of her feet grew louder; she would be only one level down. The patter of her feet grew louder, and now I could hear her breathe, in and out, an even measuring of the stairs. I stared hard at that door and maybe her breath caught for an instant as she passed on the other side, feeling without feeling the force of my gaze. Then the sound of her began to diminish. Before they faded out of my hearing, I reached out to her with my mind, the way my ma had taught me before she went away, and made the girl stop short, mid-step, the sole of her foot an inch from the riser. She exhaled and inhaled but her feet, for two seconds, did not move. She felt like she must fall down, but then I let her go, and one foot followed the other as nature intended. That would be something for her to think about when she reached the top.

My ma called me Havel after someone who died in time out of memory. She had a painting of him she took from a museum when she was out scavenging that she made into a shutter for the little house with no windows where I was born. Or so she told me because I only remember the smell of that house, like something had half-died there but never finished the job. I'm the only Havel I know, and sometimes I imagine that I'm the only Havel there is, or was. Except for whoever it was that half-died in our house, I call him Havel too, in what passes for my memory.

Later I will write more, hoping to top 1000 words for this first day of real writing. But I almost must work on my snowflake.

How do books work?

I woke up this morning before the sun wondering how to get from point a to point b, and trying to remember how others do it. The point a I'm thinking about is sometimes called "part 1" and point b is "part 2," or in series of novels telling one story, volumes one and two.  Having decided that I wanted each part to feature first person narration, but with two different narrators. I read somewhere the first person narration was forbidden in fantasy fiction, but also that it was normative in young adult fiction. But putting aside genre for now (and perhaps forever), the rationale for a first person narration in a novel with young adult protagonists is to convey their perspective (and only their perspective). My thought was that the narrator of the first part would be a secondary but important character in the second part. The third part would be in the third person, so that I could have both main characters (and others). Do I know of any other works that employ this structure? Not off hand, but I'll take that to be a good thing, not a bad thing.

In the movies, there must be a great car chase, a bad guy must get what's coming to him (or maybe her or it), the protagonist must survive (though there could be doubt about this), but the job cannot be done. Jason Bourne survived the first movie, got the girl, killed the bad guy, and then went off to live in anonymity and obscurity in Goa. But for some inexplicable reason, other bad guys saw the need to come all the way out there and kill his girl friend, so now there's a motivation for the next installment ... At the end of every Harry Potter volume, the kids win the game (while nearly perishing), and go home for the summer, to do it all again next year. The pattern is a little more troubled toward the end of the series. In LOTR, there is only one continuous story, broken every five hundred pages, or three hours, at a convenient turn in the story. But nothing with respect to the main quests (those of Frodo and Aragorn) is resolved at the end of volumes one or two: that can't happen until the end of the last volume. Similarly, in His Dark Materials, the endings of volumes one and two are provisional, and not very hopeful. In many ways, things keep getting worse and worse. New characters are introduced along the way and carry the story forward, while sometimes the previous main characters disappear (always to re-appear): Lyra and Will must be there at the end, just as Frodo and Aragorn must be there at the end. Maybe JKR could have actually killed off Harry (or one of this chums) at the end, but we all knew that he would prevail against Voldemort. The ending of Harry Potter is somewhat unsatisfying because here are all these main characters, all grown up and ready to do an adult's work in the world, and there's nothing left to do. We see them middle-aged, living in the suburbs, sending their kids off to a safer Hogwarts. LOTR has the right side winning at the end, but in true epic saga fashion, the main characters pay a price for their ordeals. Aragorn faces mortality and Frodo goes into "exile," sailing into the West. Pullman has the darkest and most provocative vision -- no wonder so many hate him: in the end, the kids have sex, God dies, and Authority falls from the sky. It's the ultimate "adolescent" happy ending.

My hesitation has nothing to do with not knowing how books work. I've read enough good ones and bad ones to know what works and what doesn't, and to know that anything can be made to work with the right combination of imagination and skill. Also, it is clear that good writing is motivated by deep and long thinking about everything, which then finds its way into a story. In this sense, all these stories are parables or fables. I'm sure what I eventually come up with will be no less a reflection of what matters to me -- even if I'm not sure what that is -- and what I know and what kinds of tricks I can perform. Sit up, shake hands, roll over.

The glories of salt

When I was in Slovakia this past winter I became fascinated by food preserved with salt: a plethora of sausage (klobasa), fish (rybi), kapušta (cabbage), beets (repa), cheese (syr), and I'm sure other things. I ate them all the time, despite the risks to my blood pressure. What's prescription medicine for but making it possible to fully live? The use of salt is the historical residue of a pre-refrigeration culture. And of course, salt makes everything taste better. Bread (also salted) is baked every day, vegetables and meat and fish are preserved for winter and for summer too. Another preservative is alcohol: grain is made into beer, fruits is make into liquor. In the spring, everyone has a garden, many of which are quite large: it is a nation of domestic horticulturists, brewers and distillers. In times past, when this was an "occupied" part of Hungary, salt came down from Poland, or what is now eastern Slovakia. In exchange, goods that came up the Danube and from Venice, were transported further inland.

Simplification

My wife said the other night that she thought that my metier for writing would be more historical than fantasy, probably because I like to tell everyone in great detail about obscure historical events. For instance, the "years without summer" (535-536) and the Plague of Justinian a few years later. I don't know much about these things, but just the ideas fascinate me and make me want to know more about the Vandals and the decimation of Byzantium. This was part of what prompted me to look again at The Salt Road, one of the ancient and rustic roads from north to south: you can still walk down them. I discovered that there was one from near Warsaw to Budapest, which accounts for the Saint Kinga from Esztergom in Hungary. In fact, not that I think about it, making Esztergom, or even Budapest one of the focal points of the story. Naturally, I would have to make this a Slavic Budapest ...

But returning to historical roots for a novel of the future, with fantasy elements, is helping me simplify the premises and structure of the story. Suddenly I had the structure for a full three self-sufficent parts -- each targeted at around 100,000 (or more) words -- with two primary protagonists, one male and one female, whose individual development and relationship can be sustained for the length of the trilogy. Also, the structure resonates with a variety of religious and traditional stories: quests, Purgatory to Paradise, for example. It's important in this genre to be able to address large issues. But anyway, my lesson for today is paring the story down to its essential elements and then maybe building up some interesting, supporting detail around that elemental structure. The current literature about post-petroleum is mostly pessimistic, framed as The Fall: I'm much more interested in a story that could be about The Rise, which could be read as a history of the future, but also as an alternate history of the past or the present. If my focal question is what it means to build a road from point a to point b? with the question of when it might be best to leave the journey unfinished, which is to say, to leave the interior uncharted, uncrossed, then I am asking a very BIG question which can be addressed in a narrative about whether a boy builds the next relay station or not, whether he tells what he finds in-between, or keeps the secret, as well as in some abstract philosophical way.

The point of writing a novel is not to escape the questions that concern philosophers, but (at some level) to escape the professional philosophers and their methods of asking and answering the questions.

an epigraph

I've started reading John Michael Greer's Druid blog, from the beginning, partly because I decided I was too cheap to buy one of his books. On May 24, 2006 he wrote:

Knowing many stories is wisdom.
Knowing no stories is ignorance.
Knowing only one story is death.

I like these lines, though I'm not sure why. Perhaps I don't like them so much as I want to use them for my own purposes, like using someone's favorite six iron as a hoe. Also noted on May 24, 2006, by the LA Times:

A driver ran over three children and two women in the parking lot of a McDonald's restaurant in Covington (GA), police said. One witness described the man as having a smile on his face. A 2-year-old girl was in critical condition; two other children and a pair of adult sisters were in stable condition, authorities said.

That's a pretty compelling story. Probably this makes for a good writing exercise: find synopses such as these and write an accompanying of two pages, double-spaced. The driver of the car (a green Honda Accord) was 46-year old Lanny Barnes (not to be confused with the female American winter biathlete), described by family members as having "mental problems," namely depression. The restaurant was closed for the remainder of the day and counseling was provided. The little girl succumbed from her injuries the next day. I learned from a conservative blogger who was outraged by this incident that Lanny Barnes was black and that his victims were white. His outrage, by the way, was in reaction to the fact that Mr. Barnes's mothers initial reported response was "he's been suffering from depression" rather than an expression of sympathy for the victims. Of course, we don't know what Mrs. Barnes was responding to, but probably a question like, "why would he do such a thing?" The author of the blog does not provide his name (though he calls himself Shamalama) but he does tell his readers that he hails from Conyers Corners, GA and is of Irish descent.

I learned from another blogger (StinkyNigs) that Lanny Barnes died of leukemia in October of 2008 while serving a life sentence at Valdosta State Prison. StinkyNigs concluded his obituary (entitled "A nigger who deserved worse") with the following: "His funeral was the one that wasted my time as it went by, but at least the Sheriff's department didn't waste any more money renting a hearse for that piece of shit nigger. Rot in hell with your nigger kin, Lanny, you fucking shining example of all things nigger. You more than deserve it. Only it should have been at the end of a rope."

The story just gets better and better, and worse and worse. In April of this year, a man was run over in another MacDonald's parking lot, though this time the deceased was a man and the driver a woman, who did not intend to hit him, or run him over. This was in Seattle and the restaurant was not closed for the day. The respective races of driver and victim were not provided. Bloggers first speculated that the victim (67-year old George Ketah) was lying drunk in the parking lot, which was why the 37-year old woman ran him over. But it looks like he was walking, was knocked down by the car, and then run over. I learned this from a personal injury lawyer blog looking for business: in this case, the family of unfortunate victims like Mr. Ketah.

As they say, "you couldn't make this stuff up."

Ambition

At different times in my life I have written for very different reasons. Now I write all sorts of things for all sorts of reasons, with many levels and types of motivation. I need to ask myself why I would put my time and energy into writing a novel. Because while I have packaged this choice for myself and perhaps others as trading in scholarship for imagination, the fact is that I could just stop doing scholarship and not replace it with any kind of writing. My decision to give up scholarly writing went into effect (a) roughly after I was promoted, and (b) specifically after my last prior commitment was satisfied, in Istanbul. This would lead me to believe that the main reason for engaging in this activity was to achieve the promotion, putting aside what that might mean to me. (Although probably I ought to take up that question ...)

The desire to be involved in creative writing comes from a sense that it sustains my life: years of scholarly pursuits had left me feeling dishonest, inept, and pointless. To write and think imaginatively is simply necessary for me to regain a fuller experience of life, and avoid alcoholism or dissipation. Or so it seems to me sometimes. I began to feel this last spring when I was teaching poetry and fiction to my Slovak students: which could be a clue as to how to sustain greater interest in teaching.

My ambition is to write something really good and to be recognized for having done so.  My ambition is to publish a work that people will want to read, and that they will pay money to read, to have a book with my name on it on the shelf. My ambition, in the end, is to make a little money out of writing so I can retire from my "day job" at around 62. I am not a youngster, which means that I'm not just starting out as a writer, and that I don't have forever to develop my talent. The time is now -- relatively speaking --- to express what talent and experience I have. Part of my experience and wisdom ought to consist in patience and taking the necessary time to do something well. There are practical reasons for this also: bring something good to market the first time and the prospects for success are better. Being more practical yet, if I were planning to write a trilogy, for instance, plan the whole thing thoroughly, create the world thoroughly, do the research, up front. That doesn't mean waiting a year before writing a single word, but it means having a fully conceived notion before getting in too deep. This was how LOTR, Harry Potter, and HDM (Pullman) were written, as I expect is true of many other very long books divided into three or more or fewer parts. 2666 presents as five separate, semi-free-standing novels, but in fact when read together they form a whole.

To commit to a whole of that scope is daunting, but as I always say, in for a dime, in for a dollar.